McDowell compared local Republicans to the Colorado
Rockies, whose attendance figures jumped this summer when the team
started winning. “Politics works the same way,” he said. “If you choose
to lose, you can’t get political contributions, you can’t get people to
work for you.”

You also can’t control the political agenda, he noted.

It’s an argument that goes to the heart of a debate simmering in
local, state and national Republican circles since the GOP wipeout in
November 2008: Does the party need to reach out to moderates and
liberals to succeed? Does success require a “big tent” where
anti-abortion and pro-choice Republicans are equally welcome?
Schultheis has never made a secret of his preference for ideological purity over let’s-make-a-deal politics.

“He wants to abandon the principles of the Republican Party in order
to win elections,” he said of McDowell. “I don’t agree with it.”

In fact, Schultheis said that the party has already become too
liberal. “It’s gone too far the other way.” It’s all the opposite of
what McDowell is saying, said Schultheis. It’s the softening of the GOP
ideological edge that is costing elections.

Colorado Republican Party Chairman Dick Wadhams seems to believe this is a non-issue and downplayed it to the Gazette.

“The issues that unite us as Republicans are fiscal and
economic,” he said, “and I think you’re going to see those issues
playing out in the 2010 elections.” He said the Schultheis-McDowell
fight was “the rare exception.”

That’s probably not true at all. Republican Kit Roupé is battling
Mark Barker to face incumbent Democrat Dennis Apuan for Colorado
Springs House District 17. The main issue dividing the two Republicans
is abortion. In the 4th Congressional District last election, moderate
Democrat Betsy Markey unseated major social conservative and
anti-abortion crusader Marilyn Musgrave in a campaign that mostly fell
along these lines.

But McDowell likely lives in the wrong district to sell this version of Republicanism.

“A pro-choice Republican is never going to win in
northern Colorado Springs,” said Daniel Cole, a local conservative
activist and a regular contributor to The Gazette’s editorial page.

“There might be some parts of the country where Republican voters
don’t like social conservatism,” Cole continued. “All I know is that
the voters certainly do like social conservatism in Senate District 9.”

The Gazette got the crux of the contest wrong. I am not an anti-social conservative, as they would lead you to believe, though i am not a social conservative.

I am running because it is unlikely that social conservatives can, as a pure party, win the legislature. They don’t have the votes, but they continue to try, sometimes by undermining other Republicans in general elections in the hopes that after a term with a Democrat they can capture the seat.

It is a strategy that doesn’t work.

Schultheis is one of the biggest proponents of the strategy. He has said over and over that he would rather have a pure party than be in a majority with people he doesn’t like.

I prefer majorities. The voters, unsurprisingly, prefer majorities. Only the activists, who think that social conservatives can pursue a pure party losing strategy forever without a backlash think otherwise.

I am the vehicle for the backlash.

If I win, it won’t have anything to do with HIV testing votes because I am not running on that.

Sadly, I can run the same campaign against any local politician because none object to a choose to lose strategy. I wish that were not the case.

I am a pragmatic Republican who wants Republicans to win. That includes social conservatives who want to be an achievable majority.

So much for your Musgrave theory.

Tom McDowell

I don’t have time to visit your blog again. As a blogger with a temporarily suspended blog myself, I appreciate the effort you put into it, and wish I had more time.

http://www.moore.net invalid-0

[…] Previously: Rhode Montijos Studio Cloud Boy, Oh Boy

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha/ invalid-0

The blonde bitch always wanted to do a little bit more that the avarage girls. So one day when her girlfriend droped by a late afternoon, they started talking about their fanasies. About gorgeouse and splendid girls, tits, masturbation, bigest orgies that they had … One thing led to another and they ended kissing and